Wednesday, October 19, 2011

OCCUPY WALL STREET is top-of-mind for care and concern with people from all over the political spectrum, all over the world. This beginning of the beginning of a new, more equitable world order might be our last, best hope at avoiding the advent of what is essentially the Fourth Reich on cyber-steroids.

The rather amorphous 'organization' or lack therof has been a source of snide opinion from mainstream pundits. But like Mr. K. observed, "You're the only one that you are screwing. When you put down what you don't understand." — Kris Kristofferson, If You Don't Like Hank Williams

The movement has an academic heritage that spans political science, economics, and literature, but its organizing principles owe a debt to an ethnography of Madagascar.

It was on this island nation off the coast of Africa that David Graeber, one of the movement's early organizers, who has been called one of its main intellectual sources, spent 20 months between 1989 and 1991. He studied the people of Betafo, a community of descendants of nobles and of slaves, for his 2007 book, Lost People.Betafo was "a place where the state picked up stakes and left," says Mr. Graeber, an ethnographer, anarchist, and reader in anthropology at the University of London's Goldsmiths campus.In Betafo he observed what he called "consensus decision-making," where residents made choices in a direct, decentralized way, not through the apparatus of the state. "Basically, people were managing their own affairs autonomously," he says.

1 comment:

I LOVE Hank Williams and in my grandmother's house the morning we found out Hank was dead seemed at least as bleak as when grandpa died shortly before.

However if you put Jr. behind the name, it is apparent that he is a retarded bigot and I'm starting to think he was adopted or fathered by the gardener while the real Hank was on the road.

I imagine it is difficult to grow up in the shadow of a legend, and for years I gave Hank 2.0 credit for doing a good job of it and thought he came up with a few good tunes. But his recent demented ramblings about Obama and other topics indicate that he is a bigoted closet Klanner or suffering the onset of dementia.

That's great line from Kris though, the source of so many great line1s